Platforms, Patchworks, and Parking Garages: Wilsons Account of Conceptual FineStructure in Wandering Significance

Late TwenCen philosophical theories of concepts confine their movements within a surprisingly constrained Carnapian compass. Already in the Aufbau, Carnap had pictured empirical concepts as having contents that were both on the one hand derived from perceptual experience and on the other articulated by their logical form. Quine is a direct descendant of this tradition. But these two broad dimensions—immediate observation causally keyed to environing stimuli and mediating inferential connections—still define contemporary philosophical thought about concepts that is less obviously influenced by Carnap. In some cases the result is one-sided emphasis on one dimension to the exclusion of the other. Fodor is representative of a group that looks exclusively to the first, responsive dimension to understand conceptual contentfulness (‘‘nomological locking’’ of ‘horses’ to horses, ‘‘asymmetric counterfactual dependence’’ of representings on representeds), taking observational concepts as the paradigm on the basis of which we should understand other sorts of conceptual content. By contrast, Dummett has championed an approach modeled on the specification of the contents of logical connectives by introduction and elimination rules. Extending that idea to yield a more generally applicable notion of circumstances and consequences of appropriate application, he seeks to understand the contents of non-logical concepts in terms of the inferential commitments they implicitly contain relating those circumstances and consequences. There are also theories that attempt to combine more even-handedly the elements best epitomized in observational and